The slightest wick remains: Fortnight 24 of the Burns

Unboxing

This box arrived a few days before Christmas...

These are the copies my US Publisher, Milkweed Editions, sent my Australian Publisher, Penguin Random House, who then sent them on to me (I'm not sure if they kept any for themselves), even though Milkweed has sent me at least one copy directly (though I told them to send it to Wellington).

So yeah. Not only is the old girl out there in the world again, I now have physical proof.

One side effect of having a "new" book arrive is that my son (2.5) asks to see my picture inside of any book he catches me reading. I'm not sure if he thinks I write ALL THE BOOKS, or that grown-ups get personalised copies with their own picture inside the front cover, as if the reader was the most important person involved in the grand production of a novel...

Maybe he's onto something.

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Fortnight 24 wordcounts

Total words: 9,337 (68% on the novel, 28% on this blog, 4% on book reviews)

1^st week: 8,142

2^nd week: 1,195

Christmas came at a bad time for work on the novel. 

I’d gotten almost everything in order so that I could break new ground (the existing chapters are now somewhere between 2^nd and fifteenth drafts) and coast the rest of the way to a completed manuscript.

But I find it nearly impossible to write at my in-laws in Christchurch, where we spent seven nights.

(Almost impossible, because I did work on this novel way back in August 2015 while in Christchurch, getting up at 5am and working until someone else woke, not knowing how short-lived that window of both kids sleeping would be…)

So I read books and ate and did family things like visit Orana Park and the Air Force Museum (and eat some more) instead. 

It’s a hard knock life.

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Well, actually…

[This is where the 500-word rant about how Slingshot cut my internet three weeks early and am still waiting for it to be reinstated used to sit... but you don't need all that.

Cliff notes: Slingshot suck. Boo Slingshot. Woe is me. The end.

PS - I’m posting this using my phone as a hotspot and churning through data I’ll probably need when I actually move out… Wah!]

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Daily centuries

Yesterday I outlined my project to write something in daily 100-word increments in 2018. 

Day two is in the books and the manuscript stands at 200 words. Hurrah. 363 days to go.

I know this is actually about Fortnight 25 but 'tis the season for repeats and rookie newsreaders, so go easy on me.

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Prolepsis

We're leaving Dunedin on 10 January and will take our time heading north, getting back to Wellington on the 20th. So Fortnight 25's post might be a week late and full of photos from Central Otago and Nelson and hopefully the pristine state my house has been left in by my wonderful ex-tenants.

After a few days of unpacking and totally not spending anytime on the phone with my ISP, I'm flying back down to Dunedin for Burns Night (haggis!!) and a couple other final acts as the outgoing Burns Fellow.

Then it's back to Wellington to watch the clock tick down on Fortnight 26 of the Burns, at which point I will crunch the numbers, make pretty graphs and see what that tells us about my year of being paid to write that maybe my fortnightly downloads and monthly consumption diaries haven't comunicated.

Oh, and I'll have to write up the best books I read in 2017. By the end of Jan, I promise!